IN THE DARK: The headlamp only comes on when you catch a brown trout. (Credit Will Burns)
One of the best fishing times my son and I ever shared together was at the Gates Lodge, fishing the fabled Au Sable River. It was the kind of father-son bonding trip I miss now that Will has a young family of his own. Searching for big browns one evening in an Au Sable river boat, we drifted past the birthplace of Trout Unlimited, the premier conservation organization for protecting cold water trout. Here is an except from its founder, George Griffith, from his memoir, “For the Love of Trout.” (out of print). Gates Lodge is now owned by writer Josh Greenberg. If you are planning a trip to Michigan, be sure to read his excellent book, “Rivers of Sand.“
See you on the river, Jim Burns
“Change comes to everything, including the river. Often it is subtle, so subtle that it is difficult for a generation to accept new restrictions, size limits, slotting. Now it’s no-kill, spearheaded by Rusty Gates, second generation owner of Gates AuSable Lodge at Stephan’s Bridge, and the Anglers of the AuSable. Many river residents, and some guides, can’t see the Holy Waters as being off-limits to keeping trout even though statistics in the late ’80s showed 80 percent of the anglers were voluntarily returning their catches to the water by choice, not regulation.
Attitudes change, often with species and availability. Advocates like Gates can help bring about change. By the late ’40s, I already was more interested in the life and hazards of trout than in catching a limit every day, or taking trout home. However, few shared my growing concern for the river. Bob Behnke, who has a clearinghouse for biologists’ findings at the University of Colorado, wrote recently in Trout magazine about the “sportsmen,” who looked down on the “fish hogs,” who would take 100 trout. As Behnke says, they call themselves “conservationists” because they only kept their limits of 25 fish!”
HOLY WATERS: Present owner Josh Greenberg keeps Rusty’s spirit of sport fishing and conservation alive at the Gates Au Sable Lodge in Grayling, Michigan. (Credit Jim Burns)
From ‘Fishing in Wild Places,’ illustrated by Terence Lambert
From the classic “Fishing in Wild Places”:
“The nearest one will come to that sort of virgin trout-water on mainland Britain is likely to be in the remote uplands — tiny streams and mountain lochs in the wide country, where golden eagles sweep the skies and osprey dive. Such places are fished, if at all, by only a handful of anglers in the course of a season, men prepared to travel light, to walk and climb for half the day and to make their way safely home in the evening without troubling the mountain rescue teams! As I have found out to my cost, the mist can come down quickly in these places, cocooning one in a cold, wet blanket of nothingness, the landscape disappears and it is hard to trace even one’s own boots.”
“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast … a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”
Prolific fishing author Roderick Haig-Brown was a conservation pioneer, spending much of his life in Campbell River, B.C. (Courtesy Museum at Campbell River)
Why should we all speak up to restore our river’s natural habitat in the face of redevelopment plans that put everything but the endangered southern steelhead first?
Perhaps, because of the recent shrinkage of two treasured national monuments, despite an outcry by millions of concerned outdoorsmen (and women). For an eye-opening read, check out What Would Theodore Roosevelt Do?
Perhaps, because of the devastating climate-fueled conflagration we all recently witnessed here in our own city, to our north, to our south and to thousands of acres all over California.
Or, perhaps, because it is simply the right thing to do.
When does the misuse of what we’ve been freely given end? A former wild river now encased in concrete is as good a place as any to take a stand. Today, when I wade the soft-bottomed sections that remain, fly rod in hand, birds overhead, I feel that fragile sense of hope return. Hope begins as a small thing, like a faint cry you can’t quite make out. But, given time, and especially nurtured by like minds and hearts, it grows and spreads. Hope becomes a powerful force.
In these depressing times, we all need sources of inspiration to nurture that hope.
Consider the 1946 masterpiece, “A River Never Sleeps.” Its author Roderick Haig-Brown lays out his best-known book’s chapters by months. January is reserved for steelhead.
The English Haig-Brown included in this chapter drawn from his experiences in a logging camp in Mount Vernon, Washington, his praise for American openness to immigrants because we are a nation of immigrants:
“When I had been in camp only a week or two, a little old Irishman whom we called Frank Skagway showed me the strength and passion with which America grips her immigrants. In the bunkhouse one evening a few of us were talking of Europe and America and the differences of the life of the two continents.
Probably I said my say for Old England — I don’t remember now — but being only two or three months away from her, I must have. Frank had been listening without offering a word, but suddenly he looked over at me, his lined and long-jawed Irish face serious as I had never seen it.
‘Lad,’ he asked, ‘do you know what country this is?’
‘No,’ I said doubtfully.
‘It’s the land of the free and the home of the brave.’ ”
Charles Frederick Holder with the Valley Hunt hounds, circa 1906.
Reading through “Life in the Open” on this rainy SoCal afternoon makes me wish I’d lived at the turn of last century. I’d trade my IPhone 6 Plus for a 100-trout day in the mountains some 20 minutes from my house. That was not an unusual catch in 1906 when outdoorsman extraordinaire Charles F. Holder wrote about all manner of fishing and hunting, right here.
Between the drought and our recent depressing search for Arroyo Seco trout, I needed to remind myself that this region has always thrived on cycles, that boom or bust goes beyond the local economy straight to nature.
A memorable Holder quote, written about our spring:
“On the mountain slopes the green heteromeles are spangled with white blossoms and the sage-covered mesa waves in masses of gray and green spires. Along the foothills a little wash is covered with wild roses that are now in bloom, filling the air with fragrance. The Arroyo Seco, the San Gabriel, the Santa Ana and the Los Angeles rivers have in the centre of the gravelly waste a silvery stream of water; and so by many tokens the angler in Southern California knows that winter has waned, and April, the month of anglers, when the rod may be plied,has come.
“If the winter has been very rainy, if 30 or 40 inches have fallen, about the annual
fall of New York, the canon streams will be running full, and the angler will have to
wait for the falling of the waters, but if the fall has been normal (18 or 20 inches),
good sport may be had in all the streams from San Luis Obispo to San Diego.”
The very good news for LA River carpers is that the fish are positioning themselves in the Glendale Narrows for the spring spawn. Lots of large brooders, up to 10 pounds, are getting ready to put on the show of the year. Fishing prespawn pays big dividends, so don’t miss it. Once the actual spawn hits, you can pretty much feggitaboutit, as they’ve got more important things than eating on their minds.
Bradley John Monsma’s “The Sepse Wild” ponders all of the good stuff about being outdoors — land, creatures and water — in such a way that you find yourself dreaming of exactly when you can adventure in his footsteps. In this book, written in 2004, he traces the history of what he terms “Southern California’s last free river,” an area north of Ojai and Fillmore that includes the 80-plus-square-mile Sespe Condor Sanctuary.
According to the Sespe Fly Fishers, the long drought has made the area unfishable for the past three seasons.
Here, Monsma remembers some of his thoughts during church in Los Angeles:
“In this place, in the company of people diverse in every way imaginable, in the heart of a city occasionally torn by natural disasters, police corruption and racial tension, I found myself thinking of salmon. Over and over, salmon would swim up the stream of my consciousness and spawn thoughts of themselves. I would will chinook smolts safely downstream through the turbines of hydroelectric dams. In the ocean, I would evade orcas, sea lions and fishermen.
“I would imagine the cold mountain headwaters calling us home, and with the rest I would strain against the current over fish ladders and waterfalls and through too-warm reservoirs infused with the chemicals of farms and factories. For years, I filled Sunday silences with prayers for fish. This was the closest thing to a spiritual discipline I’ve ever been able to maintain, other than walking or paddling.”
Once electric Red Cars delivered passengers all over L.A., which is celebrated in this riverly mural. (Barbara Burns)
Back in the day, Dick Roraback represented the journalist I wanted to become: after being graduated from The Sorbonne, he’d worked on the Herald Tribune in Paris (While on assignment in Africa, he’d somehow bamboozled the desk into publishing his story with the byline “By Ghana Rehah,” which got him suspended.); he was worldly, snide, grouchy, looked very old, and ripped through my fledgling restaurant reviews in a torrent of computer red ink. He seemed to me a refugee on the Los Angeles Times copy desk, a bit of the lion in winter. At the time, I wanted nothing more than to be like him — bold, intelligent and brash, thumbing his nose at the world and having a great time doing it.
I did wonder how this talented writer landed on the copy desk, reading the works of others, but no longer producing himself. Maybe “be brash in moderation,” I thought to myself.
By the time he’d again taken up ink and plume, I’d moved across town to become the travel editor for the Herald Examiner, and I didn’t read his series “In Search of the L.A. River,” published between 1985 and 1986.
In a recent paper entitled “Writing a river: how journalism helped restore the Los Angeles River,” academic Tilly Hinton argues a strong case for Roraback’s contribution to raising awareness about the river, and how this awareness helped to create the political will for change. She credits him alongside poet and FOLAR founder Lewis MacAdams as two pillars of the event.
I think Roraback would feel peeved to think of himself as a pillar of anything, and from what I’ve read MacAdams was none too pleased with the snarky tone Roraback used in his pieces. (For that matter, MacAdams also seems a wholly unlikely pillar, yet that he is, with a recent riverside plaque to prove it.)
For the series, which began at the river’s mouth in Long Beach and moved up to the headwaters, Roraback invented a character named “The Explorer.” At one point, The Explorer visited a man who kept an aquarium of fish captured from the river:
“Up in Atwater Glen on the other side of the channel, Tom Babel, manager of the riverside Port of Call apartments, allows as his community is a peaceful enough place to live –“You just gotta watch your back.” Just north, it seems, is “Toonerville, where anything goes.”
Even so, Babel likes living by the river, though he keeps his RV primed for a quick exit. “There’s been occasions when the rain got heavy and the river got two feet from the top of the bank,” he says. “I’d already started packing my important papers in the RV, ready to head for the high ground. . . . “
Larry Wickline, Babel’s stepson, takes a kinder view of riparian life.
“After the rains,” he says, “there’s rainbow trout this big! Keepers! You get catfish, carp, crayfish. Come up to my apartment. I have something to show you.”
Indeed he does. In Wickline’s flat is an illuminated fish tank holding an amazing variety of fish — gold, brown, white — all taken, he says, from the Los Angeles River.
“Good fishing when the river comes up,” Wickline says, “Except sometimes you can’t take a step for all those tiny snakes.
“It’s not so much the snakes, though, as the gangs. I wouldn’t go down there without a gun. At night, I wouldn’t go down there at all. . . . “
What I find particularly interesting about this passage is that, if true, rainbow trout were still in the river in the mid-80s, contrary to everything I’ve read about their disappearance from the river decades earlier.
The series certainly sparked interesting letters, including this one from Gene Lippert of Hacienda Heights:
“Just a note of appreciation for all the hard work Dick Roraback put in to bring us his fascinating story of the present Los Angeles River (‘In Search of the L.A. River,’ an occasional series.) I am following his tale with great interest.
“You see I lived my Tom Sawyer youth on the Los Angeles River in the area of the Imperial Highway bridge. That was before the ‘big paving extravaganza.’ We skinny-dipped in the pools, caught crawdads by the dozen and boiled them in an old can filled with river water and a dash of vinegar. We always kept supplies such as salt, pepper, coffee, cigarette butts (good for a couple of more puffs) in tin cans buried in the river bank. Small-sized trout were plentiful and easy to catch on a bent pin (had to jerk the fish out of the water and onto the bank the first time he nibbled or away went your bait). We slept overnight in the river bed most of the summers (dry, clean white sand). We were almost ridden over by a bunch of horses one night while sleeping. We had made camp in weeds four or five feet high and the fire had gone out.
“One time we stole redwood from an irrigation flume and built a boat. We got our caulking by digging the tar from between the expansion joints in Imperial Highway and melting it over a bonfire. The boat was a bust — it kept tipping over.”
So now I find Dick’s shadow once again moving across my writing life. Sometimes unlikely people follow you through time in the most unexpected ways.
Author David James Duncan (Courtesy High Country News)
Written as an afterword 20 years later to his successful “The River Why,” David James Duncan ponders our environmental future. The reference to Thomas Mann’s classic “Buddenbrooks” is appropriately obscure, but when you realize that book is about the decline in health of four generations — each less healthy than the last — it gives this warning, written in 2003, even more poignancy today.
“Our legacy as Americans, like that of Hanno Buddenbrooks, is too powerful to escape. That the world is small, that its so-called ‘resources’ are not a boundless economic bonanza but finite parts of a fragile and holy web of life, that humanity is part of the same web, that the web’s health and ours are as closely connected as a child’s life and its heartbeat — these God-given links and limits will, I feel certain, be the scalding revelations of coming decades. Because they will scald, I pray for other revelations that soothe like love and water — and I believe we’ll get them. As wrongheaded and deadly as humans can be, we haven’t eradicated love or water yet.”
The best — and possibly the saddest — way to know what you’ve missed is by delving into the past. It seems almost nihilistic to look too closely, yet we must.
I remember years ago interviewing an old professor in Madrid who transported me back to a time when single, young men drank coffee and women, hot chocolate, both sexes beautifully dressed for the flirtation that naturally followed. As I listened with my tin ear for castilian Spanish, at first I thought how “modern” I was, and how silly, how sexist, it was to confine the sexes to different hot beverages. But as I walked home, a certain nostalgia overcame me to a point that my footsteps eventually just sort of scuffed along the pavement as I wondered at the clothes, the conversations, the intrigue that happened in those early years of the last century.
Can old books and IPads go together? (Jim Burns)
That day I became a true believer in remembering what we’ve lost, if for no other reason than to preserve that which deserves preserving today. Sure, this time, right now, remains a special one, full of hope and promise I believe outweigh all of the impending zombie apocalypses. Yet, reading Charles McDemand made me pine for a Sierra now vanished, for he wrote his classic “Waters of the Golden Trout Country” in 1944. McDermand penned his trampings along ranges few will travel, bringing his seven-foot fly rod, seven-and-a-half foot leader and “pack board” to dozens of rivers, streams and lakes. Here’s a sample:
“While ichthyologists have long argued over whether steelhead trout are a separate species or not, I had always considered them to be any rainbow trout which had gone out to sea and returned. Fresh from the plentiful food and the colorless habitat of the sea, they were always silvery, energetic fighters when re-entering fresh water. It had been my belief, and the belief of many a seasoned steelhead fisherman, that any of these trout, if landlocked in fresh water for a few months, would return to their usual brilliant coloration.
Now, at Lake Italy, I found my opinions shattered by the squirming, silvery evidence before me. This was a steelhead; there was no doubt about it in my mind. By no possible chance, short of wings, could it have journeyed from the seas through the miles of cataracts and actual falls descending from the Sierra. Obviously, someone had planted steelhead fry in Lake Italy. They had grown and remained silvery instead of reverting to a rainbow coloration. Accordingly, to me steelhead must be a separate and distinct species, not just any rainbow that has gone out to sea and returned.”
Cellphones take on a whole different identity in a landfill! (Courtesy Treehugger)
John Voelker, aka Robert Traver, did a whole lot in his life, ranging from lawyering, to writing the best-selling novel, “Anatomy of a Murder” in the late 1950s. And he loved fly fishing.As you can see, he wrote in an age when the telephone was a stationary object. Once you’ve read his excellent testament, please take a moment to fill out the survey.
Do you leave your cellphone at home when you fish? (Then how do you shoot your “grip ‘n’ grin” hero shots?).
See you on the river, Jim Burns
Testament of a Fisherman
“I fish because I love to; because I love the environs that trout are found, which are invariably beautiful,
and hate the environs where crowds of people are found, which are invariably ugly; because of all the
television commercials, cocktail parties and assorted social posturing I thus escape; because, in a world
where most men spend their lives doing things they hate, my fishing is at once an endless source of
delight and an act of small rebellion; because trout do not lie or cheat and cannot be bought or bribed or
impressed by power, but respond only to quietude and humility and endless patience; because I suspect
that men are going along this way for the last time, and I for one don’t want to waste the trip; because
mercifully there are no telephones on fishing waters; because only in the woods can I find solitude without
loneliness; because bourbon out of an old tin cup tastes better out there; because maybe someday I will
catch a mermaid; and, finally, not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important but because I
suspect that so many other concerns of men are equally unimportant — and not nearly so much fun”
lariverflyfishing 